


Fears

by oofmilk



Category: Frozen (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Coming Out, DO NOT read as inc/est, Gen, Internalized Homophobia, Post-Canon, Post-Frozen 2 (2019), anyway I’m gay so Elsa is too, other characters are only mentioned so I didn’t tag them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:35:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23271850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oofmilk/pseuds/oofmilk
Summary: Everything was completely fine up until Anna’s most recent visit to the Enchanted Forest.
Relationships: Anna & Elsa (Disney)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 42





	Fears

**Author's Note:**

> I really tried to nail down the fear that comes with coming out to somebody you’re close to. Elsa’s feelings are based on my own.

Everything was completely fine up until Anna’s most recent visit to the Enchanted Forest.

Well, no. Elsa wouldn’t use the word ‘ _fine_ ’ to describe it at all. What she meant was that things were _manageable_ up until Anna’s most recent visit. By manageable, she of course meant “I can and will ignore it until it physically hurts me.” By things, she meant Honeymaren.

Elsa didn’t know when the traitorous feelings had taken root in her chest. One moment she had been helping Honeymaren tend to the reindeer, and the next Elsa was wondering just how long she could hold the other woman’s hand before it became odd. Almost desperately Elsa had chalked these weird and new feelings up to gratitude over having a genuine friend so far away from her birth kingdom. Anything that couldn’t be explained away by this gratitude was stuffed deep, deep down in her heart and locked away indefinitely.

She had done a considerable job keeping her feelings in check the past few months. Not once did Elsa slip and make it known to _anyone_ what was raging inside her heart and mind. Elsa had planned to keep it that way, to take these feelings to her grave. Until Anna had come up for a visit, and she toppled those plans as if they were made of sand. 

“You know, I try to visit as often as my schedule allows, but every time I come up here something new takes me by surprise,” Anna said to her sister on the second night of her visit. The two were seated by the campfire in the center of the Northuldra camp.

“Oh yeah?” Elsa asked. “What surprised you this time?”

Anna gestured to where Ryder and his boyfriend—his name eluded Elsa, she would have to ask Honeymaren about it later—were busy leading the reindeer along the edge of the camp. “You don’t see people like them in Arendelle too often.”

“…Northuldra?” Elsa asked, puzzled by the vagueness of Anna’s statement.

“No, Elsa, I mean men in love with other men.”

Oh.

Elsa opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came to the forefront of her mind, so she shut her mouth. She wasn’t surprised to see people like Ryder and his beloved up here. Men being with men (and by extension, women being with women) were as natural to the Northuldra people as breathing or blinking. They hadn’t known that people could hold it within themselves to be so bigoted and hateful about love, and so they had been shocked when Elsa told them same-sex marriage was iffy in Arendelle. By iffy she meant that it was really on a ruler-by-ruler basis how the topic was handled. She wondered sometimes how same-sex marriage had never been brought to the metaphorical table while she was still the queen. 

The king before Elsa, her own father, King Agnarr, had been fairly impartial towards it as a whole, as if he couldn’t be bothered to give it the time of day. This impartialness didn’t prevent Elsa from seeing the way particularly nasty citizens looked at or treated those couples of two men and two women. She heard whispers, before she had hurt Anna, before she was shut in her own room for thirteen years, of how those couples were dirty and wrong, and that they should be punished for loving who they did. With nothing much else to do (other than cry and be fearful) within the confines of her bedroom, Elsa took to turning over those whispers in her mind day after day, month after month, year after year. Eventually she had taken them to heart, but instead of the whispers being projected back outwards, they settled into every nook and cranny of her brain like a horrible infection.

Now, sitting here next to her sister, the whispers attacked her mind full force. Logically, Elsa should have found Ryder and his boyfriend revolting—that’s what those citizens believed, and who was she if not a woman of the people? However, she couldn’t bring herself to hate them. Ryder was a good man, and she loved him like a brother. Elsa found herself allowing the buried feelings about Honeymaren to resurface, and instead of ignoring them, she picked through them, dissecting what could be dissected. She compared the two of them to Ryder and his boyfriend (Why? Why was she doing that?) and only grew increasingly alarmed when the similarities kept stacking up. Elsa couldn’t love—or not even love, _like—_ Honeymaren like Ryder loved his boyfriend. It was wrong, wasn’t it? That’s what the whispers told her every time she considered it.

Elsa was pulled out of her thoughts by the realization that Anna was gazing at her, her eyebrows knit together in concern, eyes searching hers for some sort of answer to her prolonged silence. Suddenly all logic and reasoning that had previously been in use were gone, replaced only by a panic and fear so primal it could only have been animal in nature. Irrational thoughts of all sorts filled her mind, with the most prominent one being that Anna had somehow seen into not just her mind, but her heart and soul, and now knew of the shameful considerations deliberating in Elsa’s entire being. That thought snowballed into the fear of losing Anna, again, before transitioning into something less primal and more instinctual—the need to escape.

So she did.

“I… I have to go,” Elsa stuttered, standing up too quickly and jankily for it to have been natural. “I’ll see you in the morning, Anna.” She turned on her heel and walked (just slow enough for it to not be considered jogging) off into the forest, paying no attention to where she was actually going.

“Elsa?” Anna asked. She stood and made to follow her sister. “Elsa, wait!”

Elsa did not wait. She kept walking, and Anna’s following only increased her anxieties. _Here she comes_ , her mind whispered in its wicked way. _Here she comes to disown you forever for wanting another woman_. She picked up the pace.

“Go away Anna,” Elsa spat. “I don’t want to talk.”

“Elsa, _please_. Is it something I said?” Anna’s voice was no farther away than it had been previously.

Something she said. Elsa wanted to laugh. That was the entire reason she was in this predicament right now, because Anna had said anything at all. Patches of ice started to form at her feet as she walked—an effect of her fear that she hadn’t yet been able to shake. Snow flurries started to swirl around their creator, working to obscure her from Anna’s line of sight.

“Elsa, whatever’s bothering you, I promise we can work it out together!” Anna said, her voice raised over the whipping of the snow flurries.

_Yes, you can work out how she will completely banish you from Arendelle forever_ , Elsa’s mind hissed.

“We can’t! Just leave me alone!” Elsa begged. 

Without looking, Elsa shot a spike of ice behind her. She didn’t aim to harm Anna, she just wanted to slow her down at the very _least_. Anna gasped when the ice jutted up around her feet, but instead of driving her away, her gaze hardened.

“Elsa! Running away won’t _fix_ anything! We’ve done this before, and we both suffered because of it!” Anna shouted over the now howling flurries. She clambered over the ice to continue following. “Just tell me what’s wrong!”

Elsa shot a path of ice a few feet in front of her. With a running start, she hit the path and slid down the length of it, hoping to put more distance between herself and Anna. Her heart was pounding in her ears, but Elsa was still able to hear a second set of feet land on the path. She had to give it to her sister, Anna was _damn_ determined (and stubborn enough) to follow her.

“Talking won’t fix—“ Elsa bit her tongue to prevent herself from saying ‘me’. “—it either!”

Try as she might, Elsa was unable to shake Anna. Every time she formed a new ice obstacle or diversion, Anna avoided it with a natural ease. Perhaps it was all those nights spent playing with Elsa’s powers as children coming back to her aid and Elsa’s chagrin. 

Eventually the sisters found themselves at a cliff that sat above a body of water, with Elsa’s back facing the cliff’s edge and Anna approaching her slowly, hands held up as if she was soothing a spooked animal. The flurries had transformed into a small storm isolated solely to the cliff and the sisters. Anna squinted against the snowflakes attacking her vision. Elsa only very briefly considered flinging herself off the edge of the cliff and hoping that either her powers, Gale, or the Nokk would catch her.

“Why do you keep running away?” Anna shouted. “I just want to help you! You’re my sister, I love you!”

Anna loved Elsa _now_ , but would she— _could_ she—love Elsa after learning about the feelings buzzing about in her chest like angered wasps? Elsa was terrified of knowing. She had already lost too much, and she refused to lose Anna ( _again_ ) as well.

“I’m scared,” Elsa found herself admitting, sounding much more like a child than one half of the Fifth Spirit.

The look of hurt on Anna’s face could have killed her where she stood. “What are you scared of?”

“You,” Elsa whispered, and the storm came to an immediate halt, leaving the snowflakes suspended around them. “Not loving me anymore.”

“Elsa…” Anna breathed. “I will _always_ love you. Nothing you do could ever change that.”

“Do you promise?” 

Anna wanted to cry. She wasn’t sure what had her elder sister so terrified, but she hated it. She hated that something could make Elsa feel like this, could make her cower like the small children they once were. 

“Of course I promise.” Anna took a tentative step forward. “You can tell me anything.”

Everything inside of Elsa was _screaming_ at her to bolt in that moment. Another voice in her mind, this one much more panicked than the first one, yelled that she had to leave for her own safety, _or else_. Elsa knew what the ‘ _or else_ ’ was, but running away again wasn’t going to work. Her heart beat so furiously that she wasn’t sure which would happen first, Anna arriving at her side or her passing out. Speaking of, Elsa took a step back, desperate to keep some sort of distance between the two of them. It seemed, once again, that distance was the only thing she had control over. She looked behind herself when Anna gasped and sucked in a breath when she realized that the cliff ended abruptly behind her.

“Anna, I…” Elsa couldn’t meet her sister’s eyes, so she instead focused on the frost spreading around her feet rather quickly. “I believe… Or, no, I don’t believe, I-I think…” She couldn’t have been imagining how her vision tunneled in on her hands clasped to her chest. “I think that I may want a relationship like Ryder and his beloved have.”

_There_ , she had said it. Now Elsa just had to wait for Anna to declare her undying hatred and leave her sobbing on the cliff.

“But Ryder and his boyfriend are gay,” Anna said, her confusion written on her face.

Elsa snapped her gaze up from her hands to Anna’s face. Just the simple act of someone _saying_ the word sent her heart and mind into a tizzy. Half of her still wanted to run, while the other half wanted to melt into the forest floor. Anna’s facial features were drawn together, trying to decipher what Elsa had said. For the entirety of the silence that stretched between them, Elsa was _sure_ she didn’t breathe. Something in Anna’s expression eventually shifted, and she met Elsa’s gaze, though still speechless.

“Anna…?” Elsa prodded gently, her voice small.

“Elsa,” Anna replied, “are you gay?”

“I…” She threaded her fingers through her hair so she would have something to abuse to ease her fears. “I… Would that… be a problem?”

The tears Anna had been fighting back finally fell free. “No! No, of course not!” She sniffed and opened her arms. “Elsa, you know I love you no matter what. You being gay wouldn’t change that.”

A weight the size of an impossibly large boulder lifted off of Elsa’s shoulders, and the suffocating pressure on her heart eased immensely. Anna… _would_ still love her. Anna would still _love her_! Tears escaped Elsa’s eyes as well. The suspended snowflakes fell to the ground with a muffled _wump!_. She removed her hands from her hair and lunged into Anna’s arms. Once there, she sobbed.

“I was scared, Anna,” Elsa cried. “I was scared that you wouldn’t love me anymore, and that I was dirty and wrong.”

“Elsa!” Anna gasped. “Who told you that?! I’ll have them arrested as _soon_ as—“

“Nobody!” Elsa interjected. “At least… not directly. I heard whispers, when we were children, before they closed the gates, and I… I took them to heart. I believed for _years_ that if I… if I thought about another woman that way, I would be a disgrace to not just our family, but all of Arendelle.”

“Hey…” Anna said softly. She gently clasped Elsa’s face in her hands. “Don’t you _ever_ think you’re a disgrace. You’re my big sister, and I look up to you. I’m _honored_ to have someone like you as my sister, Elsa. I love you.”

Another sob escaped Elsa, but this time it was a happy one. “I’m so relieved. Thank you, Anna. Thank you so much.”

“You don’t need to thank me for loving you. That’s what a family is supposed to do, and if they don’t,” Anna shrugged, “then you need to find a new family.”

Elsa managed a laugh. “I feel like such a fool now, being scared over something like this.”

“Your fears were justified,” Anna said. “As much as I hate to admit it, there _are_ people in Arendelle who hate people like you, and Ryder and his boyfriend.”

“But not here, with the Northuldra,” Elsa said, and the verbal reminder filled her with a spot of hope.

Anna smiled. “No, not here with the Northuldra.”

The two stood for a moment, Elsa basking in this first bit of acceptance since her self-realization while Anna held her steady. After a few minutes, or maybe it was a few hours, she couldn’t tell, Elsa sniffed and spoke again.

“We should head back to the camp. We left pretty suddenly.”

Anna dropped her hands to Elsa’s. “Of course.” She paused, as if considering her next words carefully. “And, Elsa? I’ll always support you, no matter what. You may be different, but you’re still my sister, and family always comes first.”

Elsa squeezed Anna’s hands. “What did I ever do to deserve a sister like you?” 

“That’s easy,” Anna said, “you were yourself.”

And with that, they started back towards the camp.


End file.
